this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
Our Philosophies:
- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
- Income inequality is the main cause of lower living standards.
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- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
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sounds like their pay is based on union rates. that's probably just a company policy for everyone.
What I'm saying is that if they can set "$0.50 above union rates" as the company policy for everyone, they can also set "$5 above union rates" as the company policy for everyone and then cut union rates by $5. It's essentially just bribing people to not join a union or penalizing them if they do. It being company policy for everyone is irrelevant.
They can't cut union rates since they have a contract. So they can, within reason, pay non union workers more but not lower the pay of union workers. One of the benefits of being in the union is that they can't just lower your wages and they may have issues firing you for bad reasons.
There's a limit to how much they can pay the ununionized workers before it becomes clear they're trying to interfere with the workers rights to free organization. In the image, it's quite likely that the extra 50¢ is union dues, or could be explained as related to costs.
Not until everyone leaves the union to get extra pay and the union loses all its bargaining power.
That doesn't make any sense. If it's about union dues, the union pay is what should be higher.
I love how people downvote my comments with absolutely zero explanation of why I'm wrong.
Replace leaving the union with going to college instead and you get why we have a 3 generation straight loss in union membership.
People told their kids to chase more money and then spent that money on cheaper foreign products and the whole house fell down within 20 years.
This was the plan by the way for capitalists.
Aren't people with college educations more likely to end up in a union? One of the reasons some places don't want to hire "overqualified" people is because they're afraid of unionization.
There's a variety of reasons for the decline of unions in the US, the main ones being:
Anti-union laws and propaganda (Mike Rowe being a big one)
Offshoring of manufacturing jobs
Major unions defanging themselves by purging radicals/communists to prove they're "one of the good ones"
No most higher education jobs aren't union. Do you bother to lookup anything by yourself before you speak about things?
Literally not what I said at all. I said that you are more likely to be in a union if you have more education. Do you bother looking anything up before trying to incorrectly correct others?
At this point it's extremely obvious that you're just trolling.
Neither of those links are remotely relevant to how higher education correlates with union membership. Trolling.
Name one industry in good faith
Ok, warehouse workers. Servers.
Pretty sure I could name any industry and the people in those industries with college degrees are more likely to be in a union than those without.
None of those require higher education or a degree. Thats unskilled/semi skilled/ and skilled labor. Which do have unions.
The claim is that a worker with a degree is more likely to take a trade position.
Teachers come to mind for unions in that regard. But that’s more a relic of the state and federal civilian union culture from 1940s through today.
When did I ever claim anything remotely like that?
When did I ever claim anything remotely like that?
You didn’t. It was in chain, it just landed on you cause I was stoned at the time.
They can't cut union rates.
Not until everyone leaves the union to get extra pay and the union loses all its bargaining power.
In my case, even that wouldn't matter. The only way for an employer to get out of a union agreement is to shut down the business completely.
sure, but whether or not they know it they have caved to the union's demands by doing that
What kind of 5th dimensional chess are you trying to play where penalizing someone for joining a union is "caving to the union's demands?"
if salaries depend on union decisions then surely they are following the union's demands.
i think the thing that makes it confusing is the missing context of whether unionised workers at that site are being paid less than non-union workers. i assumed the answer was no because it sounded like they had a CBA that the person was not aware of, since the alternative would have been immediately struck down by any union worth its salt.
My guess would be that this person is part of the collective bargaining block, but does not pay dues (possibly public sector). So the contract she describes was negotiated by the Union, and is the same contract that everyone in her position gets, union or otherwise. She probably just doesn't realize it.
Could be wrong, but the above situation is unfortunately pretty common.
They can't cut union wages that's the whole point of collective bargaining and they're just maintaining competition with union rates which is legal. That competition might be specifically devised to draw potential employees away from union contracts and people may be dumb enough to go for it but that's capitalism however dumb that may be.
One of the main goals of unions is to increase worker pay. Mission accomplished.
The issue here is that if more people choose not to join a union for the pay raise in the short term, unions become weaker in the longer term. The capitalist in this case is paying a premium now to divide up labor for the chance down the line to save more money on labor overall in the long term.
Thank you, this is exactly what I said, but since you don't have a .ml next to your name people might not just randomly attack you over it.
Great, they increased pay for non-union workers, the workers leave the union for increased pay, now the company cuts union pay, and now there's no organization for the workers to do anything about it. "Mission accomplished" indeed.
Congrats you just figured out capitalism, .ml is speaking volumes here.
Thank you, yes as an .ml I do understand capitalism better than most of the people replying to me, it seems.
Which facts are you talking about, exactly?
You yourself said:
So you agree with me, lots of people in this thread disagree with me 1 2 3, but you're attacking me because??? I'm on .ml???